Rare unidentified gear bags hard nerfed.

[Xeneth.9260]

What the hell ?Today I come back to the game after 1 week break, I bought about 2.2k bags of rare unidentified gear. Boosted my mf up 770 % in Silverwastes and started opening them, hoping for some decent exotic drops.I got LESS than 15 exotics ? 15 !!!! From 2.2k bags!What.the. fuck.I feel cheated out of the money I spent buying them. Did anyone else have a similar experience ? Is this a bug, should I report it ?

[phs.6089]

Information is money just like the lack of it isn't

[Squeak.7093]

Magic find no longer affects the identification of unidentified gear. (quoted from March 26th patch notes.) Please read next time ;)

[Loosmaster.8263]

Read the patch notes.

[Xeneth.9260]

What a bummer that is. I guess it's my own fault to an extent but they should've added some sort of information about that if you hover over the damn items. Just like some bags have "affected by magic." How hard is it to add "no longer affected by MF."Not everyone has the time to read every patch note. Fucking fuck.

[Ok I Did It.2854]

All the loot was nerfed, the patch was one giant loot nerf hidden as a QoL update, there are posts on reddit where people have done 100's of thousands of bag openings and it shows the rewards are nerfed, but people dont like to believe anet would do something like that to them.

Anet might aswell remove the ability to sell blue/green armor on the TP now, as there are nearly no buy offers on any armor at all on the TP.

The concept of what they did works on paper, but its execution in game not so much.

[Linken.6345]

@"Xeneth.9260" said:What a bummer that is. I guess it's my own fault to an extent but they should've added some sort of information about that if you hover over the kitten items. Just like some bags have "affected by magic." How hard is it to add "no longer affected by MF."Not everyone has the time to read every patch note. kitten kitten.

So the massive drop in price for rare unided gear wasent a indication?

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"Xeneth.9260" said:Today I come back to the game after 1 week break, I bought about 2.2k bags of rare unidentified gear.I got LESS than 15 exotics ? 15 !!!! From 2.2k bags!What.the. kitten.I feel cheated out of the money I spent buying them. Did anyone else have a similar experience ? Is this a bug, should I report it ?

• The change happened on the 26th, over a week ago.
• It was announced on the 21st here in the forums.
• Did you not notice that the price of unID gear dropped from ~30s to closer to 20-25s? (The market loss was even more substantial on common & uncommon containers.)

Not everyone has the time to read every patch note. kitten kitten.There are several threads in the forums (I made several posting results from others opening 1000s of bags, some people complained about the change, some praised it). There was a blog post well before the change went into effect, there were posts all over reddit and elsewhere on the net.

I grant that one can't read every note. I hope you'll also grant that ANet can't be responsible for every misunderstanding that might result from people not doing so.

[zealex.9410]

@Ok I Did It.2854 said:All the loot was nerfed, the patch was one giant loot nerf hidden as a QoL update, there are posts on reddit where people have done 100's of thousands of bag openings and it shows the rewards are nerfed, but people dont like to believe anet would do something like that to them.

Anet might aswell remove the ability to sell blue/green armor on the TP now, as there are nearly no buy offers on any armor at all on the TP.

The concept of what they did works on paper, but its execution in game not so much.

Loot was bloated for a while now. A nerf isnt unjustifiable.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"Ok I Did It.2854" said:All the loot was nerfed, the patch was one giant loot nerf hidden as a QoL update,They were frank about the impact. We know this because they mentioned it as one of the two reasons:"...provide both quality of life improvements and help with the long-term health of the economy."

there are posts on reddit where people have done 100's of thousands of bag openings and it shows the rewards are nerfed,As everyone who pays attention to the overall economy expected. Ever since PoF launched, and especially since Istan, the markets for rares & exotics dropped substantially, with massive profits going to those with super high MF and effectively lowering income for those who didn't boost their MF to open unID gear.

but people dont like to believe anet would do something like that to them.On the contrary: many people are quick to believe the worst of ANet. Me? I assume ANet wants to be profitable and that in general, they've found that being mostly upfront is mostly a good way of doing htat.

Anet might aswell remove the ability to sell blue/green armor on the TP now, as there are nearly no buy offers on any armor at all on the TP.That's not really meaningful. Armor was cheap before the change and in the aftermath of the change, the amount of blues entering the market skyrocketed. That will ease off after a bit. (Basically, with enough MF, the blue unID gear stopped dropping blue gear.)

The concept of what they did works on paper, but its execution in game not so much.Actually, it's done everything that was expected by those watching the overall health of the economy: it's boosted the value of rares & exotics, and even impacted the sigil market some. It's evened the playing field for everyone IDing gear.

The next steps will come with the expected changes to sigils|runes, among other things that ANet posted about recently

[Ok I Did It.2854]

PM'd you instead of battling this out here.

Ill just say i respect your view, but i have to disagree with it.

[Drecien.4508]

I always read patch notes first. They have vital info in them. Knowledge is power, or lack of in this case.

[Bloodstealer.5978]

I am confused tbh.. if MF needed to be nerfed to make it fair for all when opening up loot.. then why have it in the first place. MF is a stat that players get to put time and effort into increasing to max at their own pace.. every player, new or old has the same ability to do so and it works the same for all. The system was not unfair just because player A has max MF accumulated over 5yrs of playing but player B only has some MF after 1 yr of playing.To nerf it because MF offered a richer return for one over another is ludicrous.. nah imo this change had nothing to do with that it was merely a nerf to take away wealth from the game as a whole. It is another change of this ilk that has been common place for a while now, certainly since the Jahai update and the requiem/sigils malarkey and very much in line with what we now know has come to pass internally .. it's about revenue and I see no reason to not be upfront about instead of passing this off as another "QoL"

[Ayakaru.6583]

@"Xeneth.9260" said:What a bummer that is. I guess it's my own fault to an extent but they should've added some sort of information about that if you hover over the kitten items. Just like some bags have "affected by magic." How hard is it to add "no longer affected by MF."Not everyone has the time to read every patch note. kitten kitten.

That goes two ways.If you know there are bags that say “affected by magic find”, logic dictates bags without this mention aren’t affected by it.

And I, too, have made poor choices by not reading the patch notes, that have costme a lot of gold. Skritt happens, they run off with your shinies. I feel for you, but you can’t really blame anet. They announced the update on social media and in the patch notes, and discussed it in the forums. Some people were bound to miss it, but that happens in real life, too.

[Rasimir.6239]

@Bloodstealer.5978 said:I am confused tbh.. if MF needed to be nerfed to make it fair for all when opening up loot.. then why have it in the first place.Because magic find is meant as a continuous bonus while playing the game. Stacking unreal amounts of magic find for a short period of time (we're talking more than three times the amount that's sustainable for longer periods of time) wasn't what ANet had in mind when they set up the system, as that doesn't benefit the general public but just a very few that use it in very specific circumstances.

Or to put it a different way: while MF did have an impact on identifying gear, it did in fact benefit regular Joe with his 5 years of built up magic find considerably less than min-maxing Jane that stacked very short-term MF boost onto her one year of accumulated MF that far out-shone the MF Joe maxed in five years of playing. That way min-maxing Jane not only got a lot of better loot for stacking short-term buffs but also reduced the wealth Joe got from just playing with maxed MF, as his drops were worth considerably less on the trading post thanks to Jane flooding it with rares and exotics.

[Randulf.7614]

@Rasimir.6239 said:

@Bloodstealer.5978 said:I am confused tbh.. if MF needed to be nerfed to make it fair for all when opening up loot.. then why have it in the first place.Because magic find is meant as a continuous bonus while playing the game. Stacking unreal amounts of magic find for a short period of time (we're talking more than three times the amount that's sustainable for longer periods of time) wasn't what ANet had in mind when they set up the system, as that doesn't benefit the general public but just a very few that use it in very specific circumstances.

Or to put it a different way: while MF did have an impact on identifying gear, it did in fact benefit regular Joe with his 5 years of built up magic find considerably less than min-maxing Jane that stacked very short-term MF boost onto her one year of accumulated MF that far out-shone the MF Joe maxed in five years of playing. That way min-maxing Jane not only got a lot of better loot for stacking short-term buffs but also reduced the wealth Joe got from just playing with maxed MF, as his drops were worth considerably less on the trading post thanks to Jane flooding it with rares and exotics.

Interesting point

[mercury ranique.2170]

there is a lot of debate about it. I think it is clear that both sides are correct.

Looking at the change to unid gear, this is clearly a nerf. Looking at the change in how it drops, it is much more complicated. It depends a lot on your preferred playstyle. They did seem to have used this to level different types of play more, so a buff here and a nerf there. I think the buffs outnumber the nerfs and make up for the general nerf of unids.Any drop research claiming one or the other is imo not correct for the simple reason that to make a judgement over such a huge scale change, you need before and after data of all aspects of the game. There is subsequential drop-research from before the change on the wiki. So on all things where now unid drops, this needs to be redone with a good representitive amount of numbers for each activity in game. This is not 1000's of bags, but more like 100.000's of bags that is needed to have a good indication.

anways, back ontopic. As said, you are not required to read patch notes, but can not claim or blame anyone for missing the information presented in them if you do not.

[Bloodstealer.5978]

@Rasimir.6239 said:

@Bloodstealer.5978 said:I am confused tbh.. if MF needed to be nerfed to make it fair for all when opening up loot.. then why have it in the first place.Because magic find is meant as a continuous bonus while playing the game. Stacking unreal amounts of magic find for a short period of time (we're talking more than three times the amount that's sustainable for longer periods of time) wasn't what ANet had in mind when they set up the system, as that doesn't benefit the general public but just a very few that use it in very specific circumstances.

Or to put it a different way: while MF did have an impact on identifying gear, it did in fact benefit regular Joe with his 5 years of built up magic find considerably less than min-maxing Jane that stacked very short-term MF boost onto her one year of accumulated MF that far out-shone the MF Joe maxed in five years of playing. That way min-maxing Jane not only got a lot of better loot for stacking short-term buffs but also reduced the wealth Joe got from just playing with maxed MF, as his drops were worth considerably less on the trading post thanks to Jane flooding it with rares and exotics.

No it doesn't.. everyone has the same ability to reach max MF and use the same buffs etc.. if it was not intended why then has it been in game for so long without the slightest inkling to do anything about it until recently, firstly with istan and now across the board. Every player starts out with limited MF and its down to the players to decide how, why when to push it upwards. The fact that someone has maxed it after 5 yrs against someone who is 1 yr in.. is irrelevant - we all started from the same position.At this point the stat is nothing more than a jumble so I would be happier seeing it taken out of the game entirely in the name of fairness not smokescreen real underlying reasons with QoL.I said many, many moos ago implementing farming maps was a desperate ploy to keep players logging in and that at some point when it has become to good for the players ANET would simply cull it to remove as much wealth from players, but then those same maps will become much less popular.I stand by my opinion.. this is not a QoL patch, at least not for players.ANET need to concentrate their efforts into making content that actually holds replay value by means other than farming because this is the kind of QoL that bean counter design decisions have .. this was nothing more than another way to clawback.

[kharmin.7683]

@"Bloodstealer.5978" said:ANET need to concentrate their efforts into making content that actually holds replay value by means other than farming because this is the kind of QoL that bean counter design decisions have .. this was nothing more than another way to clawback.How does one define "replay value" in a time when new LS chapters are consumed by skilled players in less than an hour or expansions in two days or less? What makes content replayable (if that is a word?) is different for different types of players. How does ANet capture the largest majority?

[Rasimir.6239]

@"Bloodstealer.5978" said:Every player starts out with limited MF and its down to the players to decide how, why when to push it upwards. The fact that someone has maxed it after 5 yrs against someone who is 1 yr in.. is irrelevant - we all started from the same position.But that's the whole point to my example: the 1-year player is nowhere near maxing their account magic find, but found a specific scenario where they could short-term boost their magic find value way beyond the values that anyone playing organically could achieve as account baseline. As such, account magic find was in fact irrelevant before the change, as the vast majority of valuable loot was going to the few that knew and cared enough to maximize their MF for a short period of time and use that period to open (collected or tp-bought) unidentified gear. It wasn't the magic find gained through years of playing that had the major impact on who would get the majority of valuable loot, but the short-term maximizing of the stat to unsustainable heights that skewed the aquisition of rares and exotics towards those that cared to play the numbers game and away from those that (for whatever reason) spent their time just "playing the game".

You can argue that "everyone could put in the effort" to boost their magic find, but Anet has demonstrated in the past that they prefer players being comparably rewarded for playing the game in the way each individual enjoys best as opposed to wealth aquisition being skewed to those who "game the system". Why didn't they put a stop to this earlier? Your guess is as good as mine, but I suspect it's down to that they'd wanted to have a better (for the general public, not specific individuals) system to replace it rather than simply gutting it with a knee-jerk reaction. As such they did in fact bring Istan (and unidentified gear in general) more in line with the general loot aquisition in all parts of the game with this change, and to me at least it looks pretty solid and well thought-out.

[Bloodstealer.5978]

@Rasimir.6239 said:

@"Bloodstealer.5978" said:Every player starts out with limited MF and its down to the players to decide how, why when to push it upwards. The fact that someone has maxed it after 5 yrs against someone who is 1 yr in.. is irrelevant - we all started from the same position.But that's the whole point to my example: the 1-year player is nowhere near maxing their account magic find, but found a specific scenario where they could short-term boost their magic find value way beyond the values that anyone playing organically could achieve as account baseline. As such, account magic find was in fact irrelevant before the change, as the vast majority of valuable loot was going to the few that knew and cared enough to maximize their MF for a short period of time and use that period to open (collected or tp-bought) unidentified gear. It wasn't the magic find gained through years of playing that had the major impact on who would get the majority of valuable loot, but the short-term maximizing of the stat to unsustainable heights that skewed the aquisition of rares and exotics towards those that cared to play the numbers game and away from those that (for whatever reason) spent their time just "playing the game".

You can argue that "everyone could put in the effort" to boost their magic find, but Anet has demonstrated in the past that they prefer players being comparably rewarded for playing the game in the way each individual enjoys best as opposed to wealth aquisition being skewed to those who "game the system". Why didn't they put a stop to this earlier? Your guess is as good as mine, but I suspect it's down to that they'd wanted to have a better (for the general public, not specific individuals) system to replace it rather than simply gutting it with a knee-jerk reaction. As such they did in fact bring Istan (and unidentified gear in general) more in line with the general loot aquisition in all parts of the game with this change, and to me at least it looks pretty solid and well thought-out.

Your missing the point.. a new player can boost their MF by the same amount as someone with max normal MF.. there is only so much a player is able to boost.. the only limiter for newer players is the lvl of some foods to get that extra 40%.. but that was the same for older players when they were new.If it was not expected, why then did ANET place the MF boosts into the game and retain them for so long.. simple anser to keep players farming certain maps because the plan to not push an expac after PoF meant players need to be kept busy farming enough to complete carrots being dangled by LS collections etc... that is not good replay value, I absolutely agree, which is why I said imo ANET need to concentrate on much more fulfilling, fun, challenging and rewarding content that keeps players wanting to come back for reasons other than one collection farm after another.MF would for all intense and purpose now be far better being removed entirely if fairness and QoL are the genuine reasons behind it.

Look UnI Gear.. my lvl 45 can loot the stuff but what I get is now useless to it as its max lvl, wrong salvage mat lvl and still worthless to sell on the TP. Why have so many types of chest/bag types.. make them all drop according to character level or map lvl if need be and do away with MF entirely now as its just not needed other than to say what colour Uni Gear you might get.

[starlinvf.1358]

@holodoc.5748 said:

@Rasimir.6239 said:

@"Bloodstealer.5978" said:I am confused tbh.. if MF needed to be nerfed to make it fair for all when opening up loot.. then why have it in the first place.Because magic find is meant as a continuous bonus while playing the game. Stacking unreal amounts of magic find for a short period of time (we're talking more than three times the amount that's sustainable for longer periods of time) wasn't what ANet had in mind when they set up the system, as that doesn't benefit the general public but just a very few that use it in very specific circumstances.

Then that's an issue with magic find boosters, not with the magic find itself as a system. Remove items that add ridiculous percentage based magic find or simply make all magic find boosts mutually exclusive so you can have only one active at a time. Problem solved.

The way how bags were handled was in my opinion completely wrong. You can't just let someone invest so much time (and money if they go the ecto salvage way) and then tell them "nope, you can't have what you worked for anymore". Like letting people craft their legendary armors and then tell them "nope, stat switching was too OP, you can't have it anymore".

Except it still not solved. The issue stems largely from around 10+ generations of reward models meant to replace each other, but has edge cases where they instead compound due to overall mobility of players. Silverwaste MF boosts were created as "loot phase" of the meta, which predates the Participation model and decoupled drop rate introduced in HOT that eventually replaced it. The UID gear later replaced the Participation model, and had magic find bonuses to off-set the fact it was replacing general loot drops across the entire expansion. This wasn't much of a problem until Istan happened. Prior to this, silverwaste was the most lucrative farm, due to the guaranteed champ bags ==which also had a flaw of dropping level specific gear, which itself was from a previous reward model for core Tyria, that was largely left alone due to it addressing a problem created by Ascended gear, which in turn was made to address a surplus of low/mid level materials, which in turn was caused by crafting having no long term plan for materials, which in turn was caused by crafting being tacked on as extra leveling system, which in turn was added to expand the number of activities for marketing reasons==

Getting back to Istan...... the 2 metas of that map had reward outputs unlike anything anyone has ever seen up to this point. This was enough to push people into the comparatively minimal effort required to use an existing, already popular farming run as a method of reward amplification. They nerfed Istan TWICE, down to daily rewards... but that wasn't enough to truncate the flow, given the huge number of people doing it as a daily anyway, and then posting them to the TP where min/maxers could consolidate that effort.

This all fits within the operational function of the Magic find. And while not linearly proportional across the number scale of MF, there are certain thresholds which significantly change the behavior of the drop tables. If 500 was the threshold for a jump in exotics, then nerfing boosters wouldn't effectively change things unless it outright prevented it from reaching that threshold. This is fundamentally what the MF system was meant to do, but we as players managed to get around its restrictions and beat the intended odds.

The reason they probably won't fix it for awhile is the amount of, by hand, re-balancing of the entire reward system, across every single area of the game. Making everything UID gear is good first step toward that goal; but they still need to go back and redo ALL of the HOT and Core Tyria reward models, to normalize them under this new paradigm. I haven't thought to check.... but if SW chest now give UID, the entire reward model there is technically broken, since a major aspect of the loot phase is currently nullified.

Getting rid of MF is the optimal solution.... but players will revolt, due to MF's psychological impact in the perception of the reward system, fair odds, and even beating the odds in the player's favor. If you think about the model of Ecto gambling, the average return rate is 90%; yet people still go for it due to that fallacy of 0.01% chance of hitting the jackpot putting them ahead. Speaking of which.... Ecto gambling actually factors into this, because it sets a mean value for Ectos due to its gold payout component. If ectos are too cheap, the gold component of winnings gains weighted value. The opposite happens if ectos are expensive.

As you can see.... the edge case of the SW MF bonus is just the most prominent right now. If that specific method was nerfed, another would simply takes its place. The whole time you're just chasing edge cases, when at its core, MF and the reward model itself are what enables them. Because keep in mind that outside of POF, UID gear replaced the drops..... but the UID rarity is still affected by MF.

[Bloodstealer.5978]

@starlinvf.1358 said:

@holodoc.5748 said:

@Rasimir.6239 said:

@"Bloodstealer.5978" said:I am confused tbh.. if MF needed to be nerfed to make it fair for all when opening up loot.. then why have it in the first place.Because magic find is meant as a continuous bonus while playing the game. Stacking unreal amounts of magic find for a short period of time (we're talking more than three times the amount that's sustainable for longer periods of time) wasn't what ANet had in mind when they set up the system, as that doesn't benefit the general public but just a very few that use it in very specific circumstances.

Then that's an issue with magic find boosters, not with the magic find itself as a system. Remove items that add ridiculous percentage based magic find or simply make all magic find boosts mutually exclusive so you can have only one active at a time. Problem solved.

The way how bags were handled was in my opinion completely wrong. You can't just let someone invest so much time (and money if they go the ecto salvage way) and then tell them "nope, you can't have what you worked for anymore". Like letting people craft their legendary armors and then tell them "nope, stat switching was too OP, you can't have it anymore".

Except it still not solved. The issue stems largely from around 10+ generations of reward models meant to replace each other, but has edge cases where they instead compound due to overall mobility of players. Silverwaste MF boosts were created as "loot phase" of the meta, which predates the Participation model and decoupled drop rate introduced in HOT that eventually replaced it. The UID gear later replaced the Participation model, and had magic find bonuses to off-set the fact it was replacing general loot drops across the entire expansion. This wasn't much of a problem until

Istan happened

. Prior to this, silverwaste was the most lucrative farm, due to the guaranteed champ bags ==which also had a flaw of dropping level specific gear, which itself was from a previous reward model for core Tyria, that was largely left alone due to it addressing a problem created by Ascended gear, which in turn was made to address a surplus of low/mid level materials, which in turn was caused by crafting having no long term plan for materials, which in turn was caused by crafting being tacked on as extra leveling system, which in turn was added to expand the number of activities for marketing reasons==

Getting back to Istan...... the 2 metas of that map had reward outputs unlike anything anyone has ever seen up to this point. This was enough to push people into the comparatively minimal effort required to use an existing, already popular farming run as a method of reward amplification. They nerfed Istan TWICE, down to daily rewards... but that wasn't enough to truncate the flow, given the huge number of people doing it as a daily anyway, and then posting them to the TP where min/maxers could consolidate that effort.

This all fits within the operational function of the Magic find. And while not linearly proportional across the number scale of MF, there are certain thresholds which significantly change the behavior of the drop tables. If 500 was the threshold for a jump in exotics, then nerfing boosters wouldn't effectively change things unless it outright prevented it from reaching that threshold. This is fundamentally what the MF system was meant to do, but we as players managed to get around its restrictions and beat the intended odds.

The reason they probably won't fix it for awhile is the amount of, by hand, re-balancing of the entire reward system, across every single area of the game. Making everything UID gear is good first step toward that goal; but they still need to go back and redo ALL of the HOT and Core Tyria reward models, to normalize them under this new paradigm. I haven't thought to check.... but if SW chest now give UID, the entire reward model there is technically broken, since a major aspect of the loot phase is currently nullified.

Getting rid of MF is the optimal solution.... but players will revolt, due to MF's psychological impact in the perception of the reward system, fair odds, and even beating the odds in the player's favor. If you think about the model of Ecto gambling, the average return rate is 90%; yet people still go for it due to that fallacy of 0.01% chance of hitting the jackpot putting them ahead. Speaking of which.... Ecto gambling actually factors into this, because it sets a mean value for Ectos due to its gold payout component. If ectos are too cheap, the gold component of winnings gains weighted value. The opposite happens if ectos are expensive.

As you can see.... the edge case of the SW MF bonus is just the most prominent right now. If that specific method was nerfed, another would simply takes its place. The whole time you're just chasing edge cases, when at its core, MF and the reward model itself are what enables them. Because keep in mind that outside of POF, UID gear replaced the drops..... but the UID rarity is still affected by MF.

Well thought through and helpful to really get to grips with the issue .. RESPECT!

I agree MF removal would in the name of QoL and fairness sort this issue out at its core, but yes there will be much salt if they tried.What they could and should of done is remove all form of unnatural MF boosting and leave it at a progressive stat to a max (300%) via the current method.. if need be at some point increase the max. That way every one has the same MF tree to climb.Unid Gear, if that is what they want as standard drops from hereon utilises MF to affect the rarity.. no issues, but those drops should be level specific as well otherwise low level toons like I already stated get to drop lvl PoF bags of no use, low value and incorrect mat levels for crafting purposes. Why have all manner of different reward types when a universally standard Unid based on level could and should be far easier to regulate, control and work fairly across the game.. if high levels want low level mats they can still use low lvls to open.. not so now which is silly.

What is more a question I would like to have answered though is why all of a sudden when these maps/farms have been established so long.. I could guess for sure, but as I said previous.. this was always likely to of happened the minute they began to introduce farm maps and carrot dangling collections that require lots of mats.. eventually the economy becomes saturated and player wealth off the charts as the maps and mechanics were allowed to be farmed 24/7 without control. MF in that respect was not to blame.The only answer was to keep introducing more and more farm intensive carrots, which in turn keeps players in the game chasing stuff to salvage/sell.

[AlexxxDelta.1806]

@kharmin.7683 said:

@"Bloodstealer.5978" said:ANET need to concentrate their efforts into making content that actually holds replay value by means other than farming because this is the kind of QoL that bean counter design decisions have .. this was nothing more than another way to clawback.How does one define "replay value" in a time when new LS chapters are consumed by skilled players in less than an hour or expansions in two days or less? What makes content replayable (if that is a word?) is different for different types of players. How does ANet capture the largest majority?

The answer to your question about capturing the largest majority is simple. All Anet has to do is identify the ow maps that have been the most active long term over the course of the game's life. Those would be the maps that have the largest crowd playing in them for the longest time after their release. Then proceed to identify the qualities that make those maps special. Thing is that if we know (and we do) which maps are these and what makes them special, Anet does too. Why they are reluctant in repeating what has worked before is another matter...

[Kurrilino.2706]

@Xeneth.9260 said:What the hell ?Today I come back to the game after 1 week break, I bought about 2.2k bags of rare unidentified gear. Boosted my mf up 770 % in Silverwastes and started opening them, hoping for some decent exotic drops.I got LESS than 15 exotics ? 15 !!!! From 2.2k bags!What.the. kitten.I feel cheated out of the money I spent buying them. Did anyone else have a similar experience ? Is this a bug, should I report it ?

Well this is a Fantasy RPG, not a stock market. If you use the game other than intended i can't feel some pitty.I would advise that your time is better spend at the NY Stock Market. If you rock this, you don't care about the loss of a gaming currency anymore.